Tom Cotton Is Not Trying to Persuade You. He's Trying to Bludgeon You.

Some arguments backing the New York Times' decision to publish the senator's screed betray a dangerously naive view of how authoritarian rhetoric operates. Many more are just dumb.

By Jack Holmes
Jun 4, 2020

After the New York Times published a fascist screed from a sitting United States senator on Wednesday, in which Tom Cotton argued—using false premises—for deploying the military to crush the ongoing protests in cities across America, a predictable argument erupted in the public square.

"Free speech!" some shouted, as if the First Amendment grants everyone the inalienable right to have their shitty opinions published in the Paper of Record and disseminated to as many people as possible. You have every right to use your speech to advocate for violent government suppression of speech, even on the eve of the 31st anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, but no one is obligated to hand you a megaphone. It's not like Cotton could not have found some other platform from which to spew this constitutionally heinous bilge. The Times' decision to grant him their imprimatur, without challenging him in any way or providing readers with relevant context, is a moral atrocity. Make no mistake: his prescription would lead to the killing of American citizens in the streets of their own cities. He said so himself.

But there was also another argument in play, and it betrayed an attitude towards the rhetoric of authoritarianism that is dangerously naive. It's a variant of the "sunlight is the best disinfectant" argument, and it holds that fascist rhetoric like this should be widely and loudly trumpeted so that it can be dismantled using Facts and Logic. Throw it into the "marketplace of ideas," where its value will swiftly plummet. But this represents a comprehensive failure to grapple with the nature of fascism, which is not bound by concerns about what is true or even what was said five minutes ago. It cannot be defeated by Reason. It continually shape-shifts and changes form, rejecting previous bedrock principles in favor of their opposites whenever it is convenient. It is necessarily absurd, because it is just an elaborate costume for a very simple message: "Obey, or I will hurt you."

Jean-Paul Sartre illustrated this in 1946, a time when the world had become well acquainted with the form.



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https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a32767317/tom-cotton-op-ed-authoritarian-rhetoric/